Self-Driving Cars Just Aren't There Yet

In an age when you can speak to your smartphone, verbally tell your TV to record a program and run daily tasks through “digital personal assistants” like Amazon’s Echo, we’re hearing a lot about artificial intelligence. To hear futurologists tell it, we’ll see Turing-compliant AI within a few years. Apps like Waze can guide us through traffic in real time, shaving minutes or hours off of trips short and long. And now ride-hailing service Uber has deployed a fleet of self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, where its engineers are testing the technology in preparation for a wider roll-out. But to bring all the hype back down to Earth, it’s worth heeding a warning from Michio Kaku, the theoretical physicist, futurist and science educator. “Our most advanced robots have the intelligence of…